New in paperbacks: Phil Klay's National Book Award-winning 'Redeployment'

Chicago Tribune

New paperbacks to check out are "Redeployment" by Phil Klay, "The Dead Key" by D.M. Pulley, "Party Like a President" by Brian Abrams, "Thirty Girls" by Susan Minot, and "Astoria" by Peter Stark.

New paperbacks to check out are "Redeployment" by Phil Klay, "The Dead Key" by D.M. Pulley, "Party Like a President" by Brian Abrams, "Thirty Girls" by Susan Minot, and "Astoria" by Peter Stark. (Chicago Tribune)

National Book Award winner "Redeployment" by Phil Klay and more new paperbacks to check out

Redeployment by Phil Klay, Penguin, 291 pages, $16

Winner of the 2014 National Book Award, "Redeployment" is a collection of short, fictional stories about the war in Iraq and its consequences told from multiple perspectives, including that of soldiers, a chaplain, a foreign service officer and uninvolved Americans. In her Printers Row Journal review of the book, editor Jennifer Day wrote that Klay's stories are "caked in dust and sweat, stinking of death and bureaucratic rot ... driven to parse out morality's place during wartime."

Astoria by Peter Stark, Ecco, 370 pages, $15.99

Stark explores the journey and settlement of the Astoria colony in the Pacific Northwest, the founding of which resulted in the Oregon Trail and later established the northern border of the United States. John Jacob Astor sent out two advance parties to the region in 1810 to settle the region, only for the majority of his men to experience violent death, starvation or madness by 1813.

Party Like a President by Brian Abrams, illustrated by John Mathias, Workman, 260 pages, $14.95

Abrams documents the wild parties, drinking and general misbehavior of every U.S. president, from Warren G. Harding's rampant womanizing to an intoxicated George W. Bush dragging a neighbor's trash cans down the block with his car. Featuring illustrations by John Mathias, "Party Like a President" also includes 44 cocktail recipes inspired by each president.

The Dead Key by D.M. Pulley, Thomas & Mercer, 471 pages, $15.95

In this thriller, a young engineer named Iris Latch discovers the abandoned First Bank of Cleveland, and its ransacked offices and locked safe deposit boxes. Twenty years earlier, the bank was sold off in the middle of the night by Cleveland's wealthy businessmen to ward off a looming federal investigation over allegations of fraud and staff disappearances.

In this novel, Esther Akello is one of 30 teenage girls abducted from a Catholic boarding school in Uganda by rebel bandits. Forced to witness and commit atrocities, Esther struggles to find an escape from what she has seen and been forced to do. Meanwhile, an idealistic American writer named Jane Wood is traveling through Africa, looking to tell the stories of someone like Esther and find her own peace.